


Caffeine and Other Addictions

by Nicole Crucial (moilArchitect)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shop, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-20
Updated: 2012-06-20
Packaged: 2017-11-22 02:25:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/604781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moilArchitect/pseuds/Nicole%20Crucial
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because every ship needs a coffee shop AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Caffeine and Other Addictions

He would be lying if he never considered the possibility of his life ending up like this. 

Dave is not cut out for college, and he knows it well enough. He knows, too, that there are worse fates than that of a barista's at a hip little corner coffee shop, and running puppet porn websites for a living is one of them. At least this way he gets free coffee and a couple breaks a day, and that is definitely a pro.

It is not the glamorous life he might have considered once, as opposed to this outcome, but for adventure and glitz he has weekends and deejaying the nightclub down the street. At least until he finds someone with enough vision (read: someone stoned enough) to agree to have a serious look-see at his SBaHJ screenplay, but hell, that could take years.

Still, Dave is not in any particular hurry to go anywhere.

On the flipside, there's this chick that comes in at an insane hour every single fucking morning, to the point where sometimes she's waiting at the entrance by the time he's dragging his half-asleep ass to the shop to open it for the day. She is crisp, clean, cool, and moves at the speed of fucking light. She's a cross between hipster clothes and high-end fashion, class and grace and dainty little blondeness, black lipstick her trademark and her signature, and between him and her, she looks like hell every day before that morning coffee.

Though he may be in no hurry, it does not mean that Dave Strider does not get bored. When there are no customers in the gray dawn light of the shop but her, he piles his green apron on the counter and slouches into the chair across from her, watching as she looks up from her laptop with a mixture of early-morning irritation and coffee-soothed amusement.

It is the same look on her face every time and sometimes it makes him feel like he's getting nowhere, but there are signs. She'll smirk at his jokes, quirk a brow at his highly inappropriate language and manners (or lack thereof), answer a few more questions than she would at the start, ask a few of her own, make more and more quips that he returns with ease and no shortage of entertainment. They'll exchange lines of their respective works of art and agree that they are suitably ironic or suitably dense and flowery. She's a poet and a writer, he learns, also a psychologist-in-training, a part-time model (didn't see that one coming but apparently she's got a galfriend in the business), and when she finds out about his deejaying, he learns that she also dabbles in clubbing.

And so that Saturday night he sees her in a tiny black dress and lays down the beats like he never has before. The club manager smacks him on the back, saying he was phenomenal, instructing him to continue taking whatever shit he is on, and maybe bring some with him next time.

The words echo when she comes in for coffee the next morning even though the shop's not open, and when he arrives to let her in despite the fact. And through the week when he finds himself struggling to keep a pokerface when she does things like wink at him, when he has the balls to engage her in games of footsie or walk her home when she sneaks in for one last coffee before an hours-long writing session--

He starts to think that maybe it isn't the caffeine she's hooked on.

When the manager smiles and asks him if he brought dope to share that weekend at the club, Dave smirks, spots a certain blonde in another little dress in the crowd, and says no, he'd rather keep his addiction all to himself.


End file.
